Some of you saw my thread in the critique section about Smoke that I posted before I went out to see him. Well, I bought him! I brought him home last Monday for a 1-month trial, but after a week I'd already fallen in love with him, so I bought him yesterday! I'd only ever been able to lease before, so he's the first horse I've ever actually owned, & I'm so excited about him!
He is a 15.2hh 7yr old solid black registered Paint gelding.
He is very intelligent & has such a wonderful personality, very very sweet & friendly & just lovely to be around. His ground manners need a little bit of work (he doesn't like standing still, & he seems to think everyone should be petting him at all times), but we're working on that.
He's so much fun to ride, & I can tell he's really loving having a job to do. He's very forward-moving with an easily adjustable stride. He gets really excited about jumping - not in an unmanageable or unsafe way, but you can tell he's thinking, "woo hoo! let me go!" He mainly just did trails & western pleasure during the last year, so we've been doing a lot of flat-work & keeping the jumps small until he builds up his muscles again. He'd also been ridden in a western curb, so we're going to be experimenting with different types of snaffles. I'm lucky that my trainer has a big selection that I can pull from, & then she'll just sell me whatever Smoke ends up working best in. I've got him in a simple d-ring snaffle right now. We're going to be doing a lot of transition work in order to get him more responsive to aids & working more off his hind-end.

I also need a show name for him! His registered name is "Designer's Silly Smoke", but I don't really like that. I wanted something that incorporated some sort of song lyric that I like, but I can't think of anything that has anything to do with Smoke, so I was thinking instead of maybe just using "Designer Smoke", but I'm not sure yet.